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Phil Goss offers Jungian perspectives on social constructions of gender difference and explores how these contribute to adult ways of relating within male-female relationships. He is concerned with gender from the perspective of our experience of being a man or a woman, as well as our socially-ascribed gender identity, and how these play out in relationships. Two key questions are posed in this book: in what ways might being a man be different from being a woman? How might these differences unconsciously define what happens in a male-female relationship? What is missing, and Goss acknowledges its lack, is equal consideration of same-sex relationships.
Goss situates his discussion within an archetypal context by drawing on the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk in order to examine the tension in western culture between masculine and feminine. Hence the subtitle, Gender Electrics and Magic Beans. Electrics, he explains, refers to the powerful forces at work between men and women which create electricity in the interactive field between and within genders. Like ‘Magic Beans’, these forces provoke change when everything feels stuck. He argues that without the electricity of provocation or stimulation, the circuits of aggressive or erotic activity cannot light up, and stability and care—highly valued in relationships—‘fall prey to a harmful form of enantiodromia….’ and ‘turn into their opposite state: destructive and implosive’ (p. 4). In his view, our usual way of thinking about relationships between men and women, brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, has the effect of filtering out the energy and power of the fields within which these relationships operate.
This is not Goss's first foray into an exploration of differences between the genders. He has written about the male psyche for the Journal of Analytical Psychology (2006) and about animus (2008). In the introduction, he writes compellingly about the personal reasons for his interest. Goss's f